Left 4 Dead 2 – Stop Whining

July 31, 2009

I'll do this to you if you bitch about this game

People have been complaining about Left 4 Dead 2. They spout nonsense such as “too soon” and “why isn’t this an update for the first game” and worst of all “lets start a petition and not buy this”. I despise these people. Give Valve the benefit of the doubt because if you liked the first game, you’ll enjoy this just as much.

I jumped on the opportunity to play one of the segments of the newly revealed swamp level over the weekend at Comic Con. Fred, myself, and two other strangers put up a valiant fight and only one of the people I didn’t know died. It felt good after how badly Dead Space: Extraction hurt me.

If you’ve played the first game, you know what this is all about. Killin zombies. Luckily, there are enough differences to set this apart from the first game. The new weapons are awesome. I tried my hand at the new sniper rifle, the AK-47, and the cricket bat. The sniper rifle was miles better than the one in the first game. It uses a clip instead of a bolt action, so i could squeeze several shots off in quick succession. Awesome. The AK was a typical machine gun and didn’t really light my world on fire (speaking of fire, the new incendiary rounds are quite nice). And lastly the cricket bat was decent, but let’s be honest, I don’t want to be that close to the infected if I don’t have to be, so I stuck with the sniper rifle most of the time.

The new infected help mix things up a bit. The spitter reminds me of Gollum, crawling around on all fours being annoying. His little spit gobs hurt and splatter on the screen. I hate him. The charger is really good at slamming me into the ground. I hate him too. (Because they’re good at messing me up, not because they’re bad ideas.) All of your other favorite special infected made appearances too, so don’t worry about them being side lined by the new kids on the block.

Hate these things. HATE

I didn’t notice any of the ‘uncommon common infected’ but the regular infected have gone through a major change: limb damage. That’s right, you can now shoot off arms and legs, making Left 4 Dead 2 even more violent than the first game. Sweet.

The level itself was set at night in a swamp. No rainbows and sunshine here folks. Most of the time we were wading around in water and it was quite spooky. At one point we came across a crashed air plane and had to open the emergency hatch to get past it, alerting a hoard. The action is just as frantic and exciting as before. Unfortunately we didn’t come across any moments that forced us to keep moving, as opposed to the old holing up and weathering the storm strategy.

After my hands on time with this game I’m confident that Valve will make it worth the sixty-dollar price point. It looks like more zombie killing fun with enough changes to justify the sequel status. Bring on the zombie rush Valve, I’m ready.